Binghamton University’s Decker School of Nursing is offering two new courses that will help train nurses for the work force of tomorrow.

The Doctor of Nursing Practice and the Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner programs will provide higher education to those who need it, said Decker Dean Joyce Ferrario.

The DNP program, which will be required by the American Association of Colleges and Nursing by 2015, will provide doctoral-level programming to students who have reached a master’s level education in nursing. The class will mostly be taken by nurse practitioners in 2010, but by 2011, it will be open students with a bachelor’s degree.

“We really needed to move in that direction so we can continue to meet the needs of primary care,” Ferrario said.

About 25 students are expected to be enrolled in the program for the fall semester, she said.

The psychiatric nursing program was designed to fill a definite need locally, because there are few practicing psychiatrists in the Southern Tier, Ferrario said.

“We absolutely need psychiatric nurse practitioners,” she said.

A few students were admitted into clinical courses of the program this semester. The two-year master’s program should have about 14 students by the fall.

Each year, Wendy Fletcher says, she and two partners see more than 5,000 patients at their practice in Morehead, Ky.
They are not doctors, but rather registered nurse practitioners who say they are able to increase access to health care and make it more affordable.

With a busy practice specializing in women’s health, Melinda Staten of Louisville is an advanced registered nurse practitioner, not a doctor. And she doesn’t want to be one.

“We’re not trying to be doctors — we never have,” said Staten, one of about 3,700 such nurses in Kentucky with advanced training that allows them to practice independently. “If we’d wanted to be doctors, we would have gone to medical school.”

But the Kentucky Medical Association claims otherwise. It’s fighting proposed legislation that would lift some limits on the ability of nurse practitioners to prescribe medication and perform other, mostly routine tasks such as signing a child’s immunization certificate or certifying the need for employee sick leave.